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Gender-neutral toys featured in Santa Fund boxes

You won’t find any Barbie dolls or blue toy guns in the Santa Claus Fund boxes, and for some kids, that could have a powerful impact.

All 45,000 Santa boxes are filled with “gender-neutral” or “all-gender” gifts. It’s a practical policy — the Star can’t ask for a child’s gender — but one that some experts say has a deeper level of importance.

“Even if the Toronto Star’s policy is not explicitly designed to overturn gender binary positions, I think it’s a good policy that it could have that kind of effect,” says Linda White, an associate professor at the University of Toronto with specialties in policy and gender. “It’s nice that an agency is not reinforcing gender binary kinds of thinking.”

The Star’s carefully selected gifts aren’t meant for one gender over the other. For that little girl who doesn’t enjoy pink dolls, or that little boy who doesn’t want to play with army toys, they aren’t being made to think they should identify with the traditional boy and girl toys.

But gender-specific toys are as pervasive as ever, and some experts suggest the pink-and-blue marketing of gendered toys is growing. “Some parents don’t have a problem with those kinds of identifications,” says White.

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Chris Veldhoven, coordinator of Queer Parenting programs at the 519 Church Street Community Centre, a Star Fund agency partner, grew up in the ’70s when “unisex” was the phrase, instead of “gender-neutral” or “all-gender.” He says he’s seen an increase in gender marketing for girls and boys.

“They can sell more, because you can’t share them as much,” he says. “They’ve been specifically designing and targeting the gender binary.”

Indeed, toys that don’t fit the Girl or Boy label are hard to come by.

“If you walk into a big box store and you look at the Christmas toy aisles, you will see an aisle that’s a sea of blue and an aisle that’s a sea of pink,” says White. “It’s increasingly difficult to find gender-neutral toys that are low cost.”

For children who don’t identify with their assigned pink or blue, the effects can be troubling.

At the 519, Veldhoven says he has been getting more and more calls from parents asking how to protect their young children from prejudice because they express their identity in different ways.

We can’t underestimate the power of play, says White. When a child is made to think they should play one way instead of the other, she says it “undermines people’s feeling of freedom and also of love of themselves, of who they are.”

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